Xbox One: Xbox Music

The Xbox Music app on Xbox One combines Microsoft's multi-faceted online music service with its new all-in-one living room entertainment system, and it does so in interesting ways. Roughly analogous to Xbox Music for the web, the Xbox One version of the app is adapted to look and work well on an HDTV and be used with an Xbox One controller or Kinect-based voice commands.

If you're familiar with Xbox One on Windows 8.1 or the web, you know that Microsoft has dramatically improved the experience since the service debuted on Windows 8 last year. The Xbox One version of this experience follows a similar, simplified style, though the arrangement and color scheme—which is a stark white instead of the black seen elsewhere—is quite different.

On Windows 8.1 and the web, the top-level choices are divided between Search, Collection (albums, artists, songs), Radio and Explore (Xbox Music Store), plus Now Playing and Playlists. Indeed, the user experience of each is almost identical. (Which I think is smart.)

Xbox Music for Windows 8.1

Xbox Music for web

On Xbox One, the experience is quite different. Aside from the sheer whiteness of it—it's a bit much, in my opinion—the layout is quite changed. Across the top, the top-level views are Home, Radio, Featured and Top Music, where the last two items offer different views into Xbox Music Store. In the default Home view, you see tiles for Playlists, Collection, and Search, plus your recent plays, which is a nice touch.

Each view is of course tailored for the display (HDTV) and the controller. So the Playlists view is tiles-based, with nice album art, instead of a boring spreadsheet-style list.

And the individual playlist view is quite nice as well.

Now Playing will appear automatically after a bit, but it's a bit hard to find manually if you're navigating around. First, you tap the Menu button on the controller to bring up a floating playback control.

Then, you tap Now Playing to see the expected full-screen Now Playing experience. You can also tap various controller buttons to bring up the song list—again, in tile, not list form—to Pause/Play or move between songs in Now Playing. This works much like it does on the Xbox 360.

(Alternatively, you can return to the Xbox Music Home view and select Now Playing from there as well.)

Other views—Collections, Radio—work similarly to Playlists, with tiles-based, rather than list-based user experiences. Radio makes suggestions, which is also available in the web interface.

You can pin almost anything to your Pins area in the Dashboard and jump-start Search at any time by tapping the (Y) button on the controller.

Voice control also works as expected, and if you tune the Kinect correctly—hint: Set the volume really loud during the tuning process as directed—it will work fine even while music is playing. You can say such things as "Xbox, select search" to use Search or use terms like "Xbox, play Van Halen," "Pause," "Next song," and so on. "Xbox, go Music" will start the app from the Dashboard.

Overall, the Xbox Music experience is pretty great. It doesn't support downloading—neither does the 360 version—and I've not yet tested it without an Xbox Music Pass, but will soon for the book. I'd switch to a black background if I were in charge, but the tiles-based UI works well with the controller, and of course voice control is increasingly addictive.

Discuss this Article 8

I have an Xbox Music Pass and with Xbox 360, Windows 8 Music app, and Smartglass, I could start playing on Windows 8 and then Play To the Xbox. With Smarglass, I could see the playlist and had limited ability to browse and choose new music. The advantage, of course, is that I don't need to power up my 50" plasma just to listen to music on my receiver. The other advantage is that Play To didn't stream to the Xbox, it instructed the Xbox to stream the music itself, allowing me to, for example, turn off my Windows 8 device. It worked relatively well.

I can't find any way of recreating this with Xbox One. The best I could do was to use DLNA to stream the music ;from my Windows 8 device (my Surface Pro) but when the Surface sleeps, the music stops.

Are you aware of any process I could use to select and play music on the Xbox One without having to turn on my TV and without having to keep a second device on? If not, seems like an oversight since I can't be the only one who wants to do this. It also seems like a step backwards from what was available with the Xbox 360.

Now, all Microsoft has to do is add music streaming from a local network (which the Windows 8.1 app does seamlessly) and the ability to play music in the background while playing a game (this is a game console, after all, and the Xbox 360 did this 8 years ago). Other that not including any of the functionality that I'm actually interested in, it's a great app.

I was considering Xbox Music Pass right until I found out that it only works with one account on Xbox. Basically to allow everyone in my family to use Xbox Music Pass I would need to purchase 4 separate subscriptions. This obviously isn't happening.

I've had Xbox Music Pass for 3 months now but I'm going to give Google Play Music a shot for one big reason. Google lets me play MY MUSIC. I'd love to use Xbox Music as I have a One and a 360 hooked up to my entertainment centers but I have about 4000 songs on my Window Home Server and Xbox Music won't play quite a lot of it (AC/DC, George Harrison, Eagles Hell Freezes Over, etc), even though it's on the same LAN. It obviously won't stream them to my Nexus 5 either. Google seems to have no such issue, as best I can tell all my music is available, whether it's in their store or not.

Example, wife and I were out to get a Christmas tree and I had Xbox Music playing in car though my Nexus 5. She wanted to play the Elf Soundtrack but it was not available. So I switched to Google and it played fine. At this point she asked why we were paying for Xbox vs Google and I had no good answer.

So I'm going to try Google via Chromecast for a couple months and see what happens

Paul
I havent face the 10h free listening limit lately. My win8 xbox music app doesnt have the "progress bar" in the settings anymore to show how far i am in my 10h allowance. I've been streaming quite a lot from the web interface too without reaching any limit.
However the website still mentions this 10h limit for free streaming.

Have you noticed this as well ?
Anyone else noticed this ?
Could it be a side-effect of the expired music pass trial that doesnt revert to the limited streaming ?

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